Radio NZ reports:

More than 9000 people aged over 65 earn more than $200,000 a year, and another 33,000 earn between $100,000 and $200,000 – and the Retirement Commissioner says it’s fair to question whether they should be able to claim NZ Super as well.

They shouldn’t.

In principle all welfare should be means tested so that it goes towards those who need it. The exception is if the cost of means testing would be close to the savings from it.

Super costs around $28,000 a year per recipient. If you means tested it to only those earning under $100,000 you would save $1.17 billion a year. That is worth doing.

The Daily Wire reports:

Israeli secret service operatives used a fake phone call to trigger what appeared to be an “emergency meeting” among Iran’s top military leaders — and then targeted the location of the meeting.

Amit Segal told the Call Me Back podcast on Monday: “What Israel did was create a fake phone call for 20 members of the air force senior staff an calling them to a specific bunker in Tehran.”

This meant there was no one to give the order to fire the initial salvo of 1,000 ballistic missiles as Iran had previously threatened to do, he added.

The added bonus for the Israelis was that Iranian military leadership was essentially crippled from the moment of Israel’s first strike against the world’s top sponsor of terrorism.

To manage to convince 20 top Air Force generals to gather for a fake meeting is a very impressive intelligence operation.

As a result, no one was “alive to give the command to strike back” when Israel hit Iran with the first missile barrage.

You really don’t want to mess with Mossad.

The Herald reports:

New Zealand First MP Tanya Unkovich is resigning from Parliament to take up “coaching and consultancy” roles in the private sector. 

In a statement released this morning, Unkovich confirmed she had resigned as an MP, saying her skills would be of better use elsewhere. 

“Serving in the public sector has been a great honour and a unique opportunity, for this I am grateful for the trust placed into me. 

“I do believe however I can personally be of more service to New Zealanders through various avenues in the private sector, as well as coaching and consultancy.”

Being a government backbench list MP is not the best job in the world, unless you are in for the long haul and think you can become a Minister. So it is not a huge surprise that some people change their mind once they get in.

The new MP will be David Wilson, who stood in Upper Harbour. He shares his name with the Clerk of the House, so parliamentarians will need to be careful about who they think they are e-mailing!

Wilson is 65 and a former chief executive of the Northland economic development agency. He has a 1st class honours masters in public policy and a PhD in regional economic development.

The Herald reports:

Serial Auckland sex offender Luca Fairgray‘s latest sentence was “manifestly excessive”, his lawyer has argued in the Court of Appeal this morning.

Fairgray, 22, was found guilty of three charges of sexual conduct with a young person by a jury in February.

In March, he was jailed for 4.5 years for crimes against the 13-year-old girl.

Judge Evangelos Thomas said at sentencing that the victim would be dealing with the effects of Fairgray’s offending for the rest of her life.

Unbeknown to the jury in February, Fairgray had previously been convicted of 10 charges for assaults against six teenage girls, including rape and sexual conduct with a person under 16.

I’d say the sentence is the opposite of manifestly excessive.

The Herald reports:

The Deputy Prime Minister is rubbishing claims that social media posts he has made about opponents of the Regulatory Standards Bill are a breach of the Cabinet Manual.

In recent days, David Seymour made a series of social media posts singling out prominent opponents of the bill, and accusing them of suffering from “Regulatory Standards Derangement Syndrome”.

Wellington mayor Tory Whanau accused Seymour of setting a “dangerous precedent” for how dissenting voices were treated, and laid a formal complaint with the Prime Minister over the posts.

What has this to do with the Mayor of Wellington? Is this just an attempt to resurrect her failed political career by auditioning for a spot on the Green Party List?

Criticising people who make hysterical claims about a proposed law is called politics. To label it as suppressing dissent is, well, hysterical.

The Herald reports:

Te Pāti Māori MP Takutai Moana Natasha Kemp has died aged 50 following kidney disease.

Condolences to her family, friends and colleagues. 50 is terribly young to die, and no doubt they are all devastated.

A by-election will now be triggered in the Māori seat of Tāmaki Makaurau, for which Kemp was the MP. The Governor-General must issue a writ to the Electoral Commission to begin making arrangements for a by-election on the advice of the prime minister. 

Kemp won the seat at the 2023 election over the incumbent, Labour’s Peeni Henare. Her margin of victory was just 42 votes.

The by-election could be very interesting. The two logical candidates for Labour are either Peeni Henare or Willie Jackson. And on the Te Pati Maori side., you could;d see John Tamihere decide to want to join the caucus and stand for his old seat? A Jackson vs Tamihere battle would be fascinating, as they are life long friends.

One complication for Labour though is Henare and Jackson are both List MPs, so if they won the by-election, then they would be replaced on the list by Georgie Dansey of Hamilton. TPM could argue that a vote for Labour will result in fewer Maori in Parliament.

Anyway the electoral side will become clearer with time. For now again condolences to those who were close to Kemp.

UPDATE: Dansey is Maori (Ngāti Tūwharetoa) so her coming in if Labour wins the seat, won’t change the number of Maori in Parliament.

The Herald reports:

General practitioners will get up to 13.89% more funding this year in a new agreement the Government hopes will eventually lead to faster care.

Health Minister Simeon Brown said the $175 million increase was the biggest – by more than double – since the current funding system began. …

This is welcome. Everyone knows the GP system is under huge pressure.

• $59m increase for the number of patients enrolled with individual general practices
• $60m to encourage practices to provide more data for what the Government called performance-based funding
• $30m performance-based funding for the vaccination target
• $26m to help prevent fee increases for under-14s and keep fees capped for people on low incomes and community service cards.

The biggest payoff is getting infants vaccinated on time.

In New Zealand there are currently more than 10,000 children who are home-schooled.

In so doing they save taxpayers $100,000,000 per annum.

You need permission from the Ministry of Education to teach you own children. This then entitles you to $796pa government support for the first child. Less for any siblings.

In NZ private schools reveive approx. $1400 per student per annum. A pitiful ammount given that they pay $3000 GST on $20,000 fees. In Australia private schools reveive above ten times that figure and 36% of students attend them. It is less than 4% in NZ.

A very key issue is why parents are choosing to educate their children is that the State System in their area is demonstrably failing them – despite paying their taxes.

This can be for reasons such as poor academics, bullying, non-allignment with parental values ….

ACT promises a “money follows the student” policy but has not got even close to establishing it.

How do we create a much better system that allows parents to choose?https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/homeschooling-numbers-double-while-funding-hasnt-changed-in-decades/YJLLAJ6KHRERVCSCXDMNYKXKLI

[email protected]

Bjorn Lomberg writes:

When a grid failure plunged 55 million people in Spain and Portugal into darkness at the end of April, it should have been a wake-up call on green energy. Climate activists promised that solar and wind power were the future of cheap, dependable electricity. The massive half-day blackout shows otherwise. The nature of solar and wind generation makes grids that rely on them more prone to collapse—an issue that’s particularly expensive to ameliorate. …

Grids need to stay on a very stable frequency—generally 50 Hertz in Europe—or else you get blackouts. Fossil-fuel, hydro and nuclear generation all solve this problem naturally because they generate energy by powering massive spinning turbines. The inertia of these heavy rotating masses resists changes in speed and hence frequency, so that when sudden demand swings would otherwise drop or hike grid frequency, the turbines work as immense buffers. But wind and solar don’t power such heavy turbines to generate energy. …

Just a week prior to the blackout, Spain bragged that for the first time, renewables delivered 100% of its electricity, though only for a period of minutes around 11:15 a.m. When it collapsed, the Iberian grid was powered by 74% renewable energy, with 55% coming from solar. It went down under the bright noon sun. When the Iberian grid frequency started faltering on April 28, the grid’s high proportion of solar and wind generation couldn’t stabilize it. This isn’t speculation; it’s physics. As the electricity supply across Spain collapsed, Portugal was pulled along, because the two countries are tightly interconnected through the Iberian electricity network.

It makes a lot of sense to have a high proportion of your energy from renewable sources, especially hydro. But trying to be 100% dependent on renewables (as Ardern pledged) defies physics.

The Herald reports:

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon says he wants to explore the possibility of scrapping New Zealand’s regional councils as the Government reforms the Resource Management Act. 

NZ First minister Shane Jones told a local government forum last week his party does not see a compelling case for maintaining regional government.

There is no compelling case for having two layers of local government in a small country like NZ.

Having local and regional councils leads to so much duplication and confusion. In Wellington the GWRC runs the buses and trains but the WCC does the bus stops and roads the buses run on. When you need consent, you often have to apply to both councils.

It would be a great day if the Government scraps regional councils, and all TLAs would become unitary councils.

Stuff reports:

Iran: No ceasefire deal but we’ll stop attacks if Israel does

Seyed Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, has said provided Israel stops attacks on his country by 4am, local time – which has now passed – Iran will have “no intention to continue our response afterwards.”

“As of now, there is NO “agreement” on any ceasefire or cessation of military operations. However, provided that the Israeli regime stops its illegal aggression against the Iranian people no later than 4 am Tehran time, we have no intention to continue our response afterwards.

Umm, that is the literal definition of a ceasefire – we won’t attack anymore, if they won’t. I guess they can’t bring themselves to admit they have agreed to one.

Anyway, regardless of how you dress it up, this is good news.

On my Patreon (paywalled) I write why the world is a safer place today. I wrote on Friday why I thought Trump would attack Fordow and was surprised to be proven right within 48 hours.

One extract:

They can of course restart their nuclear programme, but there are two great hurdles in their way. The first is that Mossad has shown great skill in their intelligence operations in Iran, and it is highly likely they would learn of the locations of any new enrichment facilities. Iran is not as closed as North Korea.

The second is their programme is estimated to have cost up to US$500 billion and do they really want to spend tens of billions on another attempt, now they know the US will bomb any future facilities if they get close to nuclear capable.

Labour saw a huge blowout in the numbers of households in emergency housing (motels) from 1,000 to over 5,000, falling back to around 3,000 at the change of government.

The government set a target to reduce this by 75% to 800 by 2023. It is 2025 and they have achieved that, with only 528 families left in emergency housing.

Politico reports:

The Iranian government ordered an operative to assassinate Donald Trump before the 2024 election, Manhattan federal prosecutors said Friday, the latest in a string of assassination plots directed at the former and future president in recent months. 

Prosecutors charged Farhad Shakeri with murder-for-hire and providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization. He is believed to be in Iran and remains at large, prosecutors said. 

So the Supreme Leader approved an assassination of Donald Trump, and now Donald Trump is the person stopping Israel from assassinating the Iranian Supreme Leader.

That wouldn’t have me sleeping well at night, if I was the Supreme Leader.

The Herald reports:

A key donor of Wellington mayoral candidate Ray Chung has been revealed, with rich-list philanthropist Sir Mark Dunajtschik confirming his financial backing for the mayoral hopeful.

Chung, currently a first-term city councillor, is running to lead the capital city on a platform of cutting key projects to implement zero rates increases. …

The philanthropist’s contributions to the city include a $50 million donation towards a new acute mental health unit at Hutt Hospital as well as $53m to build the city’s new children’s hospital.

Mark Dunajtschik is a great Wellingtonian and New Zealand. He cares massively about Wellington, so it is great to see him backing a candidate who wants to have 0% rates increases instead of 20% increases.

The Government set a target of reducing the number of victims of violent crime from 185,000 to 165,000 by 2030. They have already achieved that.

The new three strikes law is now operative. It is not as strong as I wanted, but still should lead to the worst criminals not getting out so quickly.

There are 43 offences (serious violent and sexual) that can cause a strike. How the strikes work:

• 1st – warning given if sentence is at least 12 months imprisonment
• 2nd – final warning given if sentence is at least 24 months imprisonment. No parole for sentence unless it is murder in which case the non-parole period is 17 years (of 15 if plead guilty).
• 3rd – if the sentence would normally be at least 24 months, then it is the maximum sentence for that offence (or 80% if they plead guilty). If manslaughter then a 10 year sentence (8 if plead guilty). If murder then a non parole period of 20 years (18 if plead guilty)

The normal manifestly unjust exception applies.

The US has bombed Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan nuclear sites in Iran using B-2 stealth bombers. It is not yet known what types of bombs were used, or the damage to the sites.